Effective Instructional Approaches

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This book on global issues, trends, and practices is intended to serve primarily as an instructional and learning resource in social studies methods courses for preservice teachers. In addition, it is an effective social studies and global education resource for college faculty, graduate students, inservice educators, and other professionals because it has divergent, practical, and relevant ideas. Teaching global education is challenging. It requires an understanding of globalization and how it affects policies, reforms, and education. Therefore, this book explores real global issues in the classroom and also offers different innovative instructional strategies that educators have employed while teaching social studies courses. The volume includes detailed reviews of literature and research findings which facilitate the design of quality pertinent units and lessons plans. Indeed, this book is a critical tool to help educators and students to gain a better understanding of globalization and global education.

Chapter Seventeen: World Tour by Bus: Teaching and Learning about Globalization by Exploring Local Places in Search of Global Connections: Aaron T. Bodle

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Aaron T. Bodle

Global educators are faced with a conundrum. How can we support students’ acquisition of skills, knowledge and attitudes ideal to global citizenship when, for most students, “global” is conceptualized as something distant, abstract and removed from their lived experiences? Furthermore, curricular materials used in global education often theorize the global as distant and portray a false dichotomy between local communities and global processes (Merryfield, 1996). Yet one key goal of global education is to promote awareness of the implications of our local actions for the greater global world (Anderson et al., 1994; Hanvey, 1976). If global education is to fulfill this goal, teachers and curriculum designers must connect the local with the global in an effort to make both more meaningful as they are enacted across the curriculum (Merryfield, 1996; National Council for the Social Studies, 2001; Noddings, 2005). I argue this is particularly necessary in social studies classrooms.

This chapter, based on data from an ethnographic study conducted in 2011, highlights the efforts of a pair of dedicated global educators who have attempted to address these concerns about global education by taking their American history students directly to the places and spaces where the global meets the local in their Rust Belt community of what I call Factory Town. Believing, as Noddings does, that one way to connect global and local interests is to ask students to “study local places appreciatively and communicate something about them to the larger world” (Noddings 2005,...

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